Somersett Case
Poets involved
What happened
In London, the Court of King's Bench ruled in the case of James Somersett, an enslaved African man brought to England from the American colonies by his owner Charles Stewart. Lord Mansfield's judgment, while technically narrow, was widely interpreted as holding that slavery had no basis in English common law and that no force could be used to remove a person from England against their will. The case did not abolish slavery in the colonies but transformed the legal landscape in Britain itself.
Literary impact
The Somersett case inspired a wave of abolitionist poetry, most famously by William Cowper, whose "The Task" contained passages celebrating the ruling, and by Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved African-American poet who referenced the case in her correspondence. The legal reasoning that English air was too pure for slaves became a powerful poetic image, adopted by Romantic poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in their abolitionist verse.
Source: Wikipedia
